Biohazard

On the last Friday of March 1979, a technician in the anthrax drying plant at Compound 19, the biological arms production facility in Sverdlovsk, scribbled a quick note for his supervisor before going home. "Filter clogged so I've removed it. Replacement necessary," the note said.

Compound 19 was the Fifteenth Directorate's busiest production plant. Three shifts operated around the clock, manufacturing a dry anthrax weapon for the Soviet arsenal. It was stressful and dangerous work. The fermented anthrax cultures had to be separated from their liquid base and dried before they could be ground into a fine powder for use in an aerosol form, and there were always spores floating in the air. Workers were given regular vaccinations, but the large filters clamped over the exhaust pipes were all that stood between the anthrax dust and the outside world.

After each shift, the big drying machines were shut down briefly for maintenance checks. A clogged air filter was not an unusual occurrence, but it had to be replaced immediately.

Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Chernyshov, supervisor of the afternoon shift that day, was in as much of a hurry to get home as his workers. Under the army's rules, he should have recorded the information about the defective filter in the logbook for the next shift, but perhaps the importance of the technician's note didn't register in his mind, or perhaps he was simply overtired.

When the night shift manager came on duty, he scanned the logbook. Finding nothing unusual, he gave the command to start the machines up again. A fine dust containing anthrax spores and chemical additives swept through the exhaust pipes into the night air.

Several hours passed before a worker noticed that the filter was missing. The shift supervisor shut the machines down at once and ordered a new filter installed. Several senior officers were informed, but no one alerted city officials or Ministry of Defense headquarters in Moscow.

In the next few days, all the workers on the night shift of a ceramic-making plant across the street from the facility fell ill. The plant had been directly in the path of the wind that night. Within a week, nearly all of them were dead.

By then hospitals were admitting dozens of patients from other areas of town who had worked in the plant's vicinity. Curiously, there were few women or children among the victims. Years later, some Western analysts wondered if the Soviets had developed a "gender weapon" capable of attacking only adult males. But women seldom worked night shifts in production plants, and few children would have been playing in the streets late on a Friday night.

Western scientists who have examined data from the accident believe that it occurred on Tuesday, April 3, or Wednesday, April 4, because the first cases did not surface until two or three days after that, which would fit the usual incubation period for anthrax. These arguments suggest to me how well Soviet officials were able to manipulate information and conceal the truth.

A colleague placed the accident on Friday, March 30, 1979. He was a Sverdlovsk scientist who recalled that he and other technicians learned of the first anthrax death — an auxiliary worker named Nikolayev — on the following Monday. That it happened on a Friday night helps explain why the workers were so anxious to get home and why so many people had passed by that evening, heading for a drink at a nearby bar. It is not unreasonable to assume that the KGB coverup included altering the dates on the medical reports of the first cases.

The last case was reported on May 19. The Soviet Union later claimed that 96 people were stricken with the disease and 66 died. The scientist who was working in the Sverdlovsk facility at the time told me the death toll was 105, but we will probably never know for sure. What is certain is that it was the worst single outbreak of inhalational anthrax on record this century.

There could have been no illusions in Moscow as to the cause of the outbreak. Chernyshov's lapse in judgment was reported as soon as the first deaths occurred. A delegation led by Colonel General Yefim Smirnov, commander of the Fifteenth Directorate, flew to Sverdlovsk a week after the incident. He was joined by Pyotr Burgasov, then deputy minister of health and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Burgasov brought with him a team of five doctors, but the government's concern for secrecy determined the handling of the medical crisis.